Chancellor's Parashah Commentary

This week's commentary was written by Ismar Schorsch, the Chancellor of The Jewish Theological Seminary.

Circumcision is the oldest of Jewish rituals and still going strong. In
his 90th year Abraham was instructed by God to "circumcise the flesh of
your foreskin, and that shall be the sign of the covenant between Me and
you. And throughout the generations, every male among you shall be
circumcised at the age of eight days (Gen. 17:11-12)." Accordingly, when
Isaac was born ten years later, Abraham circumcised him on the eighth day
(Gen. 21:4).

The rite has not been without its detractors or dangers. In the
Maccabean era, Jews eager to make it in the Hellenistic world tried to
have the operation reversed. The Romans regarded circumcision as a form
of castration, which they found abhorrent, and denied Jews the right to
circumcise converts, thereby restricting Jewish efforts to proselytize.
Among the Conversos in Spain and Portugal ferreted out by the inquisition
for preserving fragments of Judaism in secret were many who dared to
circumcise their sons or themselves as adults. And in our day the Nazis
checked for circumcision to identify Jews, a nightmare chillingly evoked
by the recent French film Europa, Europa.

Sadly, in the nineteenth century many educated Jews came to agree with
the critics of Judaism that circumcision was a primitive and debilitating
rite that marked Judaism as unworthy of admission into enlightened
society. In protest they refused to subject their children to it and
gave rise to a heated debate whether uncircumcised Jews are in fact Jews,
an interesting analogue to our own debate over who is a Jew. Despite the
widespread revulsion, Reform Judaism never proposed discarding the rite.
Though not a sacrament that made one Jewish, it was too central to Jewish
consciousness and too hallowed by Jewish blood to be eliminated. On the
contrary, in America, at least, Jews have persuaded much of gentile
society to adopt circumcision for prophylactic reasons.

The biblical injunction to circumcise every male child surprisingly
extended beyond one's natural offspring to "His hanhe homeborn slave
and the one bought from an outsider who is not of your offspring, they
(too) must be circumcised, homeborn and purchased alike (Gen.
17:12-13)." The law bespeaks a domestic economy that rested on slave
labor and a household ideal that frowned on the presence of
non-Israelites. Hence, gentile slaves were to be converted, even without
conviction. Later Jewish law preserved the requirement; slave owners
were given twelve months to circumcise their slaves or set them free,
unless the slave's previous owner had specifically stipulated that the
slave was not to be converted. In other words, at a time when Jews still
played a prominent role in the international slave trade, as they
apparently did in the early Middle Ages, bringing pagan slaves out of
eastern Europe to the Muslim Caliphate and Christian west, Jewish law
accepted conversion to Judaism for ulterior motives.

The relevance of this halakhic precedent to the problem of intermarriage
in our own day is striking. To my mind it makes a mockery of the extreme
argument by many Orthodox leaders that conversion to Judaism is
halakhicly admissible only when inspired by faith and a readiness to
comply to the totality of Jewish law. The insistence on converting
slaves to protect the formal unity of the Jewish household suggests
otherwise. In this instance Jewish law exhibited a remarkable degree of
flexibility to accommodate economic reality.

The gravity of the American Jewish predicament calls for nothing less.
Ulterior motives do not halakhicly disqualify the desire to convert.
Where possible, the formal unity of the Jewish home should be preserved
by a conversion that will admit the non-Jewish spouse to the possibility
of an ever deepening experience of the power and beauty of Judaism. If
done with patience and sensitivity, a rite of passage that begins as a
formality may well end up as a matter of faith.

For Abraham and his descendants, circumcision became the sign of the
covenant between God and Israel. But to what does it point? The rite
itself was not new. The Egyptians and many other nations of the ancient
Near East practiced it, probably at puberty. The Torah adopted it, but
shifted it to just after birth.

Circumcision is a statement about the incompleteness, indeed, the
imperfection, of God's creation. Humanity had already once before driven
God to destroy what had been wrought in a fit of exasperation. But not
again. This time God chooses the pedagogic road, a nation of teachers
and exemplars. The commandment to circumcise follows immediately after
the blessing of Hagar that her son Ishmael "shall be a wild ass of a
man; his hand against everyone, and everyone's hand against him (Gen.
16:22)."

The offspring of Isaac, to my mind, are to offer a more noble and
god-like alternative with passions in harness. In the state of nature,
man is a creature of excess passions. Circumcision is an act of
submission to a higher ideal than mere survival, an act of
self-discipline and instinct renunciation. At birth we enter a
partnership whose ultimate goal is to circumcise the heart. Only then
will the process of creation be complete. No wonder the ceremony of
circumcision has prevailed; it signifies the very essence of Judaism.